What are GW?
Find out more about 'the messengers of Einstein' - Gravitational Waves - propagating disturbances in the curvature of space-time caused by the motions of matter... [Image Credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL]

:: Synopsis of Gravitational Wave Research ::

Gravitational waves will not only allow us to test the predictions of General Relativity in regions of strong gravity, but will also serve as a tool to expand our understanding of the Universe. Direct observations of gravitational waves are being pursued by an international network of advanced (second generation) laser interferometric detectors. Presently a significant amount of effort is being devoted by this research community in developing algorithms and data analysis pipelines to efficiently search for gravitational wave signals in noisy data. Compact binary coalescences are interesting as sources of gravitational waves because their rates are expected to be favorable and their phases can be modeled to a very high accuracy, so that matched filtering can be used to search for them.

Gravitational waves, however, can probe a much wider range of known and (so far) unknown sources, where the phase evolution in most of cases is unmodeled or ill-modeled. A Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB) is one of such source, which can be created by overlapping GW signals from unresolved astrophysical sources in the nearby anisotropic universe. A weaker isotropic SGWB is also expected from GWs produced in the early universe. Gravitational wave researchers in IUCAA work on astrophysical and cosmological aspects of both types of sources and on devising methods for detecting them.

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We are a part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration - a group of more than 900 scientists worldwide who have joined together in the search for gravitational waves. The group seeks to use them to explore the fundamental physics of gravity, and develop the emerging field of gravitational wave science as a tool of astronomical discovery.